High-Volume Commercial Real Estate Transactions With Annie Malo, Real Finds Podcast #34 Transcript
Gordon Lamphere: Today we’re grateful to have Annie Malo on the podcast. Annie is a partner in Holland & Knight’s real estate practice, and she gives us deep insight into what’s occurring in the industrial and retail sectors on the East Coast, with the kind of perspective on deal making that only someone who does hundreds of annual transactions can offer. If you’re interested in deal making, investing, or brokerage, it’s well worth a listen. Annie, thank you so much for hopping on the podcast today.
Annie Malo: Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.
Gordon Lamphere: Before we start, can you introduce yourself to our viewers?
Annie Malo: I’m a partner at a national and international law firm, currently working out of the Boston office, though I travel a lot. I do commercial real estate, particularly volume transactions. My clients tend to buy, sell, or lease more than twenty or thirty sites in a given year, which is how I define volume, and I provide uniformity and reliability for volume clients.
Real Estate Chose Her
Gordon Lamphere: Why commercial real estate law? There are a lot of places you can practice.
Annie Malo: Real estate is who I’ve been my entire life. I started doing real estate investing with my dad when I was sixteen, the real dirt way: pouring foundations, shoveling gravel, laying laminate tile, back in the early 2000s when that counted as tile. He and I, along with my sister and my mom, spent nights and weekends doing that. So I’ve done ground-up development since I was sixteen, more than twenty years ago. That company grew in North Alabama. I went to college and law school, and when I graduated, I fell right back into real estate. I already knew the space and the needs of the business, so I started practicing real estate law and started my own development company. Honestly, it chose me. I never made a formal decision. It’s part of who I am.
Gordon Lamphere: It’s rare for lawyers to also have that investor mentality. How do you balance being part of transactions and investing on your own?
Annie Malo: I keep them very separate. Professionally, I do retail and industrial leasing, buying, and selling. Personally, my development company is single-family and multifamily residential. But when it comes to financing, the needs of the business, profitability, and cap rates, they intertwine. In a law firm setting, when an attorney comes up without understanding the deal, you can miss why you’re negotiating the terms you are. I work really hard to understand, and I know what it feels like on the business side when a term or a deal goes sideways. That’s what I can give clients. Clients and former clients call and say, this is a legal question, but what would you do if you were the developer? How does this make you feel? I can say, this is my concern and how I’d handle it, recognizing we’re different people with different risk assessments, but this is what I’ve experienced as the result of that decision.
Uniformity Over the “Best” Deal
Gordon Lamphere: Simon Sinek has talked for ages about your why, and one of the biggest differences between a good and bad real estate attorney is how many questions they ask a developer or broker about why they’re doing a deal. You’ve got a background at Harvard and MIT and really get into the ins and outs of deals. Deal uniformity is discussed often, and you do a large volume. What’s shaping your perspective on deal making in Q3 2023?
Annie Malo: For me, uniformity is the value in a lot of what we do. If you do one or two deals a year, your goal is the best deal, the best lease, the best purchase agreement, and that’s a great place to be, because those make up your entire process and income. When you’re doing 250 deals a year, and I have clients who do 25 and clients who do 250, you realize the value may not be in fighting to the end for the best you can get. It sounds silly, but the value may be in knowing, five years from now, that the bottom line is the same in all your leases. Is it the best term you could ever have gotten? Probably not, for the majority of your landlords or tenants. If you’re a powerful retail tenant, maybe you could have gotten more because you out-leveraged sixty percent of your landlords. But having to go back every three or four years to check what you got in one deal versus another, and constantly making sure you’re not exercising things too early or too late because every deal is different, is a burden. Having those deals share the same structure, even if the little things change, means that five years from now you can say, I know Annie’s team did all our deals in this period, I know our bottom line, I have my deviation memo and issues list and my one-pager saying it’s on our standard form, and I can rely on my gut for what’s typically going on without pulling files and having another attorney reread the documents. There’s a lot of comfort in that, and that’s what volume clients are really looking for: reliability in knowing what they generally have, rather than always getting the best deal.
Tracking Thousands of Deals
Gordon Lamphere: We’ve really tried to develop that in our group. We have around fifty assets just in this county, and creating a uniform deal is a game changer at high transaction volume. For small office and small industrial, we’re sometimes doing two, three, four leases a day, and you can’t renegotiate every term. How do you keep track of all that data? Everyone says data, data, data, but if it’s endless and unorganized, it’s like bailing the ocean.
Annie Malo: For those who’ve followed my YouTube channel and my growth in the industry, one reason for our move from our prior firm in June 2023 was technological options. My team has been working with the IT teams to develop software specific to us and protected by us that tracks all of it. Anyone on my team who touches a deal tells the system what they touched, why, and the next anticipated touch. The system has the client, their business person, the director of real estate or on-the-ground rep binding deals and project managing, so you can sort and search by it and always give an update. It has landlord names, repeat landlords, and repeat landlord counsel, because real estate is a small world. Even working nationally, I end up opposite the same attorneys all over the country, and when I have relationships with them, deals get done faster. So I make sure that if one client has dealt with one landlord through one person on my team, that same group does every deal from then on. That makes deals uniform and fast.
It also has an outside function. We give clients access to the same program, a little more limited, so rather than sending mini check-in emails, “I haven’t heard from you in a week and a half, what’s going on with the site in Utah?”, they can go to our site, sort by their name or site names, and see exactly where every deal stands. It’s faster for them and for us. It also lets me, as lead attorney, go in any time, and if a client calls about an issue, I can see where the attorney is and step in. Over time, what we did at our prior firm with different software, and what we hope to show again, is that we’ve shortened deal times by nineteen or twenty percent because of the uniformity, the reliability of the team, and the processes and forms. We get you to signing faster, which gets your doors open faster, which means you make money faster.
The Biggest Recurring Problem: Time
Gordon Lamphere: Time kills deals. When you do a lot of deals, you see recurring problems. What’s one of the biggest that landlords and investors should consider?
Annie Malo: Not understanding how long things take, and it cuts both ways. Eighty percent of my practice is retail, so let’s focus there. Most deals have a due diligence period and then a permitting or approvals period to get land development and building permits and everything you need to put a shovel in the ground. Everyone negotiates an LOI with the best intentions, but inevitably my landlord says, I know the guy who gives building permits, it’ll take you thirty days, you don’t need sixty days of diligence or 120 days for permitting. Bob down at the local office is going to love having this national tenant, he’ll rubber-stamp it. That never happens. I’ve seen very well-connected landlords step in and agree to a shorter period, and 120 days later they’re asking for extensions, because when you’re building to a national standard, everybody looks at it. That’s the reality.
But I’ve seen problems on the other side too. The retail business person has been burned, had to go back for extensions, and everybody hates that position. You’ve got a hundred thousand dollars in the deal, permits are still ninety days out, you’ve only got thirty, and you have to ask for sixty more, which pushes the landlord’s rent date. So that business person starts asking for an exorbitant amount of time, 270 days, and then we sign the lease and they call me and say, Bob gave us permits. We waive, and the landlord says, wait, you’re not supposed to be here for another two hundred days. The landlord isn’t prepared. They may still need to evict a tenant or grade the site, and now they’re afraid they’ll get burned on delivery. Neither side is great. I get laughed at at work because I have my marriage analogy: a lease is a marriage, and you don’t want to hate each other on the wedding day, which is the day you sign. You’re negotiating a relationship that lasts twenty or thirty years. It’s not a sale. You’re stuck with each other, so you have to talk. With a lot of clients now, we negotiate all the way through, and at signing I ask, what does your permit team say this will really take? Then we readjust dates so everyone’s closer and nobody’s surprised. Surprise on either side doesn’t make anybody happy. It sounds like taking space early means rent starts earlier, which is great, but the landlord isn’t prepared and then they’re panicked. The more you talk and understand the dates, the happier everyone is.
Gordon Lamphere: In Chicagoland, permitting has lengthened significantly post-COVID because a lot of offices outsourced it. Brokers who did deals pre-2020 say it takes thirty or sixty days, and those with enough volume have realized that’s no longer the case. Are you seeing that in other markets?
Annie Malo: I’m seeing it in different areas of the deal, up and down. Permitting, I’d say, is getting closer to what it was, because deal volume slowed and offices are catching up. During COVID, everyone got out of the office, and then real estate boomed from the end of 2021 through all of 2022, so you had people not fully back in the office plus extra volume. Real estate has slowed and people are coming back, so that’s balancing. What I’m seeing now, particularly in diligence, is that smaller jurisdictions, rural western Virginia, your Utahs and Montanas, have offices open only two or three days a week. Not remote, just open Tuesday through Thursday, so you can’t apply for a permit on Friday or Monday. That’s true of permitting and of title. Land records are only open Tuesday and Thursday in some very rural jurisdictions. Many of my clients, especially ones that are federally regulated, have to balance a location in a high-income area with one in a lower or moderate-income area, so we’re doing a lot of rural deals and running into it. Those used to be rubber stamps, because they were thrilled to have a national tenant or a QSR. Now they’re just not open. Surveyors are backed up like nobody’s business. Environmental reports that took three weeks now take six, just to be told it’s clean. They’re not digging into dirty dirt; there are fewer of them, working harder, doing great work, but it takes longer.
That’s one benefit of doing hundreds of deals. My team does thousands a year, and I personally still manage 200 to 300. We talk constantly. This call is in the morning, and I’ve already talked to three team members twice, because new deals came in and we discussed capacity and regions. Because of the volume and the daily conversation, these things come up. It happens twice, a team member calls and asks, are you seeing this? I send out a blast, and everyone says, we need to tell our clients to negotiate longer environmental periods or apply earlier. One large client just changed their entire title ordering process because of the new time lags, so in certain regions, title is now ordered three weeks earlier than it used to be, so everything stays on time.
The Post Office Problem
Gordon Lamphere: One tenant that’s everywhere is the US Post Office. I’ve heard you speak on problems with the Post Office and eviction law. What’s going on, and what should landlords know?
Annie Malo: Landlords aren’t really being reached out to by the Post Office. Most post offices exist and have for a very long time. The one in the town I grew up in is still in the same location after almost forty years. There are investors who specialize in government service buildings, not just post offices but FBI and other agencies, whose buildings are generally owned by third parties and leased. Those leases are very formulaic. You have little negotiating power. It’s here’s your lease, take it or leave it, but we’ll pay you every month, which is nice. Landlords who specialize in post offices know what that means: it pays every month, and every five to fifteen years you sign a new lease you have little say over.
What I’m seeing recently is newer developers looking at a post office that’s been there forty years, in a building that’s a teardown from a developer’s perspective, hearing that post offices are closing and merging and shrinking, and thinking, their lease expires in six months, they’ll want to move, I’ll buy it, scrape it, and lease it to a retail tenant. The problem is the Post Office can’t just pack up when the lease ends. They’re a federal agency. To move, they need internal approvals and funding, then another location or a merger, plus a whole set of notice requirements, because the town post office can’t close without telling anybody. So they’re not nimble enough to get out, and you end up with a government entity in a building they technically don’t have a right to be in for months and years. There’s no true eviction process. Those leases are governed by federal law, with an administrative board within the Post Office you can appeal to, but it doesn’t solve the problem. So you have a landlord who didn’t know what they bought, trying to lease it to a tenant who wants the site because it’s in the middle of town on a great corner, and the Post Office isn’t trying to be difficult. The people who work there want a new building too. Everybody wants the same thing and nobody can do anything about it. I’ve seen it slow deals for years, and you’re at the mercy of federal funding and the fact that the federal government shuts down every now and then. It’s probably not the right first deal. It takes patience and the ability to have capital tied up. I’ve done a lot of post office deals, and I get it, but I’ve seen several with this exact scenario. So when you’re dealing with government, or even a federally or grant-backed nonprofit, do your research before buying or leasing, because even when everyone’s on the same page, the paperwork and internal process can really slow it down.
Gordon Lamphere: Our group, a couple of decades ago, would never have worked with nonprofits or the federal government. We’ve found federal leases and federally backed nonprofits are pretty good. The State of Illinois has been difficult; sometimes you don’t get paid for eight or nine months. For an early-stage landlord, that’s probably not tenant number one.
Outdoor Retail Space
Gordon Lamphere: You’re a retail specialist, and the Wall Street Journal was talking a couple of weeks ago about outdoor space. There was absolute craziness about outdoor retail during the pandemic, where it was a necessity but also caused combativeness between tenants. As we get more walkable, it’s something we want, but it creates free-rider and liability issues and concessions between tenants. What are you seeing?
Annie Malo: It depends greatly. In suburban and rural America, it’s not really an issue. You’re on big lots, and the landlord says, you want this sidewalk? Fine. I live in Boston, and here it’s been a big deal, especially for restaurants. During COVID, with the restrictions, these restaurants are in buildings built two hundred years ago that already only fit seven tables, and with six feet of spacing they could serve three people. So outdoor space became a huge premium. And because everyone walks in Boston, you can’t put tables on the sidewalk, so restaurants give up parking. The city essentially leases them portions of the street, which takes parking from the neighborhoods, a whole other issue. In the inner city, it’s less a landlord-tenant problem than a city-tenant problem. In leases, landlords say, we’ll cooperate and sign an application as long as it costs us nothing, but we’re not guaranteeing it. You often can’t use the sidewalk for accessibility reasons, so you fight with the city. Boston has done a decent job: roughly Memorial Day to early October, you pay a fee for the rent of those parking spots, build out the outdoor space, and take it up at the end of the season. It’s neighborhood specific. The South End is more outdoor friendly, the North End has a process, and Seaport doesn’t need it because it’s already so large.
In a shopping center setting, the outdoor space tends to go to the big boxes, because landlords don’t want it to look junky. It’s the same reason you have so many prohibited uses against secondhand stores and going-out-of-business sales. So it goes to your Harbor Freights and Lowe’s, places with nice, organized outdoor displays they constantly turn over. Non-QSR restaurants sometimes get outdoor seating, but it’s regional. Do you really care about investing in that in Maine or upper Montana? In Florida, or in middle America with a fall and spring, it’s high value. It used to be a benefit: we’ll give you the corner, build your tables, insure and maintain it, and we’re good. Now I’m seeing landlords say, that’s extra square footage, and we want you to pay for it.
Gordon Lamphere: We don’t do much pure retail, but we do a lot of quasi-retail flex space, and outdoor space has been a huge issue in flex industrial parks with breweries and restaurants alongside experiential uses like dance studios, gymnastics, and indoor golf. People fight for parking and for ingress and egress. In well-parked buildings, it’s not an issue; people are happy to see the activity. But when parking gets thin, it gets hotly contested. It’s a balancing game for a lot of municipalities. We’ve seen a big transformation in industrial and flex industrial over the last half decade. What are you seeing in industrial?
Industrial and Infill
Annie Malo: It’s going to be steady. The world was shocked that industrial spiked when everything else was falling, but it makes sense given what falls under industrial. Everyone loves that their Amazon package comes in twenty-four hours or less. My sister in Houston gets things in two to three hours. The reason they can do that is a massive warehouse stuffed with half of what they sell to that region. That’s industrial. When people hear industrial, they think steel and smelting and things that smell bad, and that’s not modern industrial. I think we’re moving away from industrial parks, because industry doesn’t produce the same toxicity and environmental issues. You can put a brewery next to an Amazon warehouse and nobody worries about smoke; there’s probably more from the brewery. So industrial is becoming more mixed use and folded into places, because if the park is on the outskirts, your package takes longer. If it’s down the street, looks nice from the outside, and gets you your package in two hours, people like that, even if they don’t say so publicly. As for people looking for industrial space, they’re still going gangbusters. The increased cost of capital slowed it a little, but the big capital influxes and JVs, which aren’t borrowing at market rates, are still looking. The third parties relying on national cost-of-capital investments have slowed.
Gordon Lamphere: We’ve seen a slowdown on the smaller end; the bigger end is still strong on leasing, less so on development. Several recent guests have discussed infill. For most markets, it no longer makes sense to keep going further out when people want same-day delivery, so we’re seeing more sites coming into Chicagoland, into traditional retail locations. Are you seeing that nationally?
Annie Malo: With retail, we’ve always been looking. Retail follows population density, and that governs where my clients go. So in a lot of cities, even with the exodus during COVID, retail was still looking to come in and expand. A lot of my large national and regional retail clients don’t take traditional loans; they use their own capital or a credit facility, so they’re less sensitive to interest rates, and they took real advantage of the exodus to get good deals in the inner city. I do a lot of work in East Coast cities, which are feeling it very differently from West Coast cities. I have team members who handle all my West Coast deals because it’s its own world, so I can’t speak knowledgeably there. On the East Coast, we’ve been lucky. The inner city is still growing. Boston has been under-housed for so long that apartments and condos keep pouring in. Selfishly, I love living in the city and having everything down the street. There’s not a lot of vacant retail in my neighborhood or the surrounding ones. Boston is small, and the city is active and doesn’t feel empty. Cities like Boston are still encouraging that. Infill has always been a thing here; now it’s a little cheaper.
Gordon Lamphere: And infill for industrial? That’s what I was really trying to touch on.
Annie Malo: That’s not my specialty, but I think part of it is that the East Coast is so densely packed. An hour outside Boston is still tightly dense neighborhoods. Connecticut is dense; there’s no rural Rhode Island. The industrial parks around here are already in the middle of neighborhoods. You walk around them. They’re parks because that was the standard when they were built, but neighborhoods are built right up to them. So we don’t have the land volume for that to be a big market people search for here. That’s my gut instinct as to why it’s not in our faces.
Retail Is in Expansion Mode
Gordon Lamphere: You see a lot of industry trends at your volume. What’s the biggest trend listeners should watch for?
Annie Malo: I’m seeing retailers take advantage of the fear of recession. We’re in expansion mode. Other partners in my firm who represent retailers outside of real estate say, because of everything going on, this is a great time, landlords need us. So there’s a full-court press to lock in less expensive land and rents. Depending on the client, retail can be a little recession-proof in deal volume because of how they plan. The deals I got yesterday are anticipated to open in 2025. That planning cycle keeps it going for the foreseeable future, and I’m hearing national expansion coming. As a landlord looking for retail volume, I’d be calling your contacts, especially QSRs, which did great during COVID, have cash, and are looking to expand. Regional brands that used to be Pacific Northwest only are now going into the Southeast, moving from one or two regional counsel to national firms; I’m opposite Greenberg Traurig on some now. A lot of my clients also do the development: they do the lease, develop the site, hold three to five years, and sell to triple-net investors, which is its own breed, a way to diversify a portfolio where the tenant pays for everything and you collect your check. That market is still going. Even my smaller regional clients are doing five to seven deals a year. I love the national brands, but I also love the guys who are a lot like me, doing expansion with their own money, on the ground, who feel things differently. Those are the ones who call in the middle of the night and say, Annie, did I make a bad decision? And I panic with them. The best part is I also have two thousand attorneys at my beck and call to help them.
The Final Four
Gordon Lamphere: Let’s get into the Final Four. Ten years from now, where do you see retail trends going?
Annie Malo: If I knew, I’d be much wealthier. Real estate is cyclical. We’ve been talking about a recession, and real estate is supposedly the worst thing to be in during one, but that hasn’t been my experience in the last two or three years. Regardless of how long the cycle is, it comes back. I think retail will always be part of it. I love boots-on-the-ground retail. I shop online a ton, but in certain areas you want to go in, pick it up, and try it. Retail will continue to expand, but it’ll look very different. Between technology and self-checkout, the store clerk is probably on its way out. But there will always be a need to walk in and hold an item, especially of a certain value. Nobody needs to try out all the toothbrushes, but to spend a hundred dollars or more, people want to feel it. And the return process: I’m terrible at returning things. I order from Amazon, forget the thirty days, and end up donating it. That’s a common problem. So long-term, expensive items will always need boots-on-the-ground retail.
Gordon Lamphere: It’s hard to return a car.
Annie Malo: Exactly. And who reboxes a mattress? I want to meet the person who exercises the hundred-night sleep guarantee on day ninety-nine.
Gordon Lamphere: There’s got to be a way. Speaking of returning, let’s return to your high school self. What would you tell yourself as a senior?
Annie Malo: Hang in there. I went to Tulane, and my first year was Katrina, so I became what we called a Katrina kid and finished at the University of Alabama. Then law school, and I graduated during a recession with no jobs available. When I did get a job, it was a five-person law firm, and everyone said you can’t go to big law if you start small. Everyone starts big and works their way small. I love big law: the expansion, how many smart people are in one place, how much knowledge I can access. But I was told over and over that starting small meant they’d never look at me. It took many steps, but I love where I am and the team I work with. All along, I was told I was doing it wrong. I’d go back and say, it’s going to work out, hang in there, and learn from those people. My first day at that five-person real estate firm, the named partner handed me a survey, drove me to the site, and said, we’re going to walk it and you’re going to tell me what’s wrong with the legal description. It doesn’t get more dirt-law than that. I’m probably the only person in my office who could take a survey and walk the land to figure out if it works, because I learned it in small law. Big law won’t spend the time to teach that, and I understand why. Those are things I wouldn’t have if I hadn’t learned along the way. It’ll be worth it. Hang in there.
Gordon Lamphere: Terrific advice. My wife came from a large firm in New Orleans to a very large firm in Chicago, and seven or eight years into her practice, a partner asked if she’d take something to court, and she said, I’ve been to federal court a bunch of times. The partner was shocked. You get tremendous experience at a smaller firm. We’re a shop of five to seven brokers, and the experience I got day one is totally different from CBRE or JLL. Now, we can’t always learn through experience, so we read. What book should we recommend to our listeners?
Annie Malo: You’re going to hate my answer. I texted my husband about this, and he said, what would you say if we were just chatting? The reality is I read a thousand pages a day. That’s what I get paid to do. I can’t remember the last time I read a business book. Probably in business school when I got my MBA. They’re great, and there are great basics books, but I learned hands-on. I read a lot, I just don’t read books. I work regionally, with a huge practice in the Mid-Atlantic, so I read Richmond BizSense, the Boston Business Journal, the Wall Street Journal, periodicals that are timely for me, every week. The things that matter to me and my clients right now are interest rates, and you won’t get that from a book written ten years ago, written before that, and then edited.
Gordon Lamphere: That’s fine. My wife is in big law, so I understand. But there’s one question I won’t let you weasel out of, and it’s the whole reason for the podcast. Who are the men and women in the arena doing amazing things in or adjacent to real estate that we should reach out to next?
Annie Malo: The two people I thought of are Stacey Mooney and Erica Darling. They run a regional conference series called Retail Live. I went to their second conference ever. It’s geared toward retailers and developers and very regional: Charlotte for the Southeast, Orlando for Florida, Austin, Nashville, New York, all the small regions. I was the only attorney present, and it was a fabulous place to meet developers and retailers. It’s the down-and-dirty meat of retail: this QSR is looking for 2,400 square feet in this block, what do you have? It’s deal making and connection making, essentially a competitor to ICSC, though I think of it as a complement. ICSC is huge and incredibly valuable, but Retail Live has these little pockets, and a lot of my clients have come from it. They call me, ask questions. I started with them in 2021, and the conferences are hugely more popular now. I’m also meeting a ton of economic development groups there, local towns that come up and say, we want to form a public-private partnership and develop this useless land into retail and mixed use. They need introductions to retailers, and the local county commissioner doesn’t have a contact at a major QSR, and they sure don’t know what kind of lease to negotiate or the pitfalls of being a locality. Those connections have been invaluable. Stacey founded it, and Erica came on shortly after, and together I hope they’re unstoppable.
Gordon Lamphere: We’d love to have Stacey and Erica on. One final question: how does someone reach out to you?
Annie Malo: One of two ways. LinkedIn is my preferred. You can go to anniemalo.com, which connects directly to my LinkedIn, so you don’t have to search. I’m almost always on LinkedIn and try to respond quickly. For a more direct potential client question, use my firm email, which you can find at hklaw.com. My email and phone number are on my profile, and I always get back to a voicemail. One of the junior associates told me my team and I are on the phone constantly, which I took as a compliment. It means I’m always talking to and helping someone. I do try to get back to everybody quickly.
Gordon Lamphere: Annie, thank you so much for hopping on the podcast, and we’ll have to have you on in the future.
Annie Malo: Thank you. It was a lot of fun.
Gordon Lamphere: Thanks again to Annie for coming on the podcast. Your support, interactions, and subscriptions truly matter and help us get quality guests. You can find us on YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. I’m Gordon Lamphere with the Real Finds Podcast. Thank you for listening.
Van Vlissingen and Co. has been the Midwest’s oldest commercial real estate brokerage, development, and management firm since 1879, and today is independently ranked the #1 commercial real estate agency in Chicagoland, home to the #1 independently ranked agent, Gordon Lamphere, and the region’s #1 ranked commercial property management team. If you own, manage, or invest in energy-adjacent, mixed-use, or transit-oriented property across Lake County, the North Shore, the Northwest and O’Hare corridors, DuPage and the I-88 corridor, Will County, or southern Wisconsin’s Pleasant Prairie, Kenosha, and Racine markets, contact Van Vlissingen and Co. at 📞 847-634-2300 or 🌐 vvco.com. For a market-wide view of where these dynamics sit today, see our State of the Chicagoland Commercial Real Estate Market for Q3 2026.